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Netherlands
Where is Delft?
Delft is in the middle of the Randstad, the urban conglomeration that made Holland, in the Golden Age and now, the most densely populated area in Europe. Geographically, it is in the marshy flat delta where the Rhine and Maas (Meuse) rivers flow into the North Sea. Without the extensive Dutch water control system, Delft would be under water, along with the nearby cities of Leiden 11 miles (18 km) to the north and Rotterdam 8 miles (13 km) to the south.
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Delft old city
The binnenstad or inner city of Delft is everything within the singel or wide surrounding moat. The old city is roughly rectangular, oriented northwest to southeast, a mile (1.6 km) long by half a mile (.8 km) wide. This shape was established in the 1400's and six gates controlled access: Rotterdamse Poort, Schiedamse Poort, Waterslootse Poort, Haagpoort, Koepoort. Only one remains, the Oostpoort, on the right edge of this image.
The viewpoint for Vroom's view of Delft (see below) is in the bottom right corner of this image. The street there, the Michiel de Ruyterweg, is what became of the muddy road running off the bottom center of Vroom's painting.
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Microscope
Specimen-side view
These are the little hand-made devices, most often brass, all a little different, that easily fit into van Leeuwenhoek's palm. With them, he discovered a whole new world that no one even suspected.
The specimen was impaled on or stuck to the pin. The screws moved the specimen, unlike modern microscopes, where the lens moves and the specimen stays still.
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Eye-side view
Because the lens was so small, around a millimeter in diameter, the specimen and the observer's eye had to be that close to the lens. This made van Leeuwenhoek's microscope very hard to use and, in fact, made its single-lens design a dead-end in the history of the microscope, which has two or more lenses.
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Animalcules
bacteria
Van Leeuwenhoek had, and was willing to use, a microscope much more powerful than anyone else had ever had. Thus, everything that he saw, he was the first human ever to see. They had no names, so he called them animalcules. While certainly some bacteria are the enemies of human life, most bacteria, as van Leeuwenhoek seemed to understand, are our friends.
His personal showcase was a microscope that would reveal the circulation of blood through the capillaries of a live eel. However, looking back after three hundred years, we see discoveries that turned out to be more important than van Leeuwenhoek could have imagined, being so far ahead of his time. On the short list now: protozoa, bacteria, sperm, and red-blood cells.
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protozoa
What astonished van Leeuwenhoek most was how these animals could be so small yet have such intricate moving parts. The rotifer pictured here has rotating parts and a darting movement through the water. And millions are them are swimming around unseen in a few drops of canal water. Van Leeuwenhoek called that number unbelievable. It was, however, true.
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Delft
View of Delft from the southeast
This painting is always titled "Gezicht op Delft vanuit het western", "a view of Delft from the west". In fact, the point of view is southeast of the city looking in a northwesterly direction. As you can see on a Google Maps view of Delft (see above) this part of the city is now a modern shopping center. The old gate is now a bridge and the brown road running off the bottom center is now the Michiel de Ruyterweg leading towards the Technical University Delft.
Hendrick Cornelisz. Vroom (1566-1640) painted this oil on canvas around 1615; it is currently on display in Delft at the Stedelijk Museum Het Prinsenhof.
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Burger
In 1655, a year after the Delft Thunderclap gunpowder explosion and around the time van Leeuwenhoek was beginning his draper's business, Jan Steen (1626-1679) painted this oil on canvas, "A Burgher of Delft and His Daughter". Clearly, Steen tells us, some families in Delft were more prosperous, and smug, than others. The Oude Kerk is in background, so the burger's house was along the Oude Delft gracht.
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St Lucas Guild
Hall of the St. Lucas Gilde off the main square in Delft, restored to its 17th century form.
The St. Lucas Gilde was the largest and most important guild in Delft. The guild, which had chapters in all the cities of the Republic, was composed of artists and art dealers, house painters and decorators, glass and pottery workers, and booksellers and printers. Only artists who belonged to the guild had the legal right to sell their work in Delft.
Van Leeuwenhoek belonged to the Sint Nicolaas Gilde for business leaders, paying his incomste in 1655 (source: Burg and Leeuwenhoek). However, he was step-son and brother-in-law to members of the St. Lucas Gilde, and he dealt with other members throughout his life. His interests complemented theirs: he sold the material artists painted on, he developed extraordinary glass-grinding skills, and he self-published his collected letters. Van Leeuwenhoek's tendency to keep his tools and methods to himself, to not share these "secrets", was fully in keeping with the guild ethos so dominant during his time.
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Aftermath of Delft Thunderclap
Egbert van der Poel
A View of Delft after the Explosion of 1654
oil on canvas, around 1654
The sky, from where God threw His destructive thunder, dominates this painting. Mere mortals, crushed under this sky, huddle in wonder, remove their dead, and tend to their wounded in the rubble of their once-proud city.
Early in van Leeuwenhoek's lifetime, most of the houses in Delft were built of wood. In the summer of 1654, van Leeuwenhoek returned to Delft from his apprenticeship in Amsterdam, bought one of those wooden houses, the Gouden Hoofd, married, and started his drapery and haberdashery business. That October, a gunpowder depot explosion, called the Delft Thunderclap, killed hundreds of people, including painter Carel Fabritius, and destroyed hundreds of wooden homes, mostly in the ensuing fire. It was the most significant event in the city's history since Willem was assassinated in 1584.
Within twenty years, the city had been largely re-built, of brick and stone this time, and the population continued to grow. Businesses like van Leeuwenhoek's would prosper under these conditions, too. His wooden house was replaced with the current brick and stone structure much later.
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Ships
VOC frigate
This is a replica of the VOC ship Batavia, built in 1628 and wrecked off Australia on her maiden voyage. The survivors' story is one of the most renowned shipwreck tales of that era.
Batavia was the Romans' word for the land north of the Rhine that was the far frontier of their empire.
Fifteen hundred years later, the people of the new Dutch Republic, who had never before considered each other countrymen, needed what the sociologists call an "origin myth". The Batavians
were the ones who did not submit to the Romans, expressing virtues of independence, fortitude and industry that the Dutch found attractive about themselves.
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Herring ship
After Willem Beuckelszoon's invention of gibbing (partial gutting and salting), the haring buis or herring ship let the Dutch go on extended voyages to follow the herring and process it onboard. These floating herring factories processed more than the Dutch people could eat, creating an export industry for salt herring that was monopolized by the Dutch throughout van Leeuwenhoek's lifetime.
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Lens on Leeuwenhoek
Overview of the life, times, and work of
the developer of the single-lens microscope and
the first person to see bacteria and protozoa.
Antony van Leeuwenhoek, who lived three hundred years ago in the Netherlands, saw things no one had ever seen before. He made microscopes that were more powerful than the microscopes that everyone else was using at the time. His microscopes let him see the tiniest living things: We now call them protozoa, bacteria, and plant and animal cells. They were everywhere, but they had no names.
Looking back, we can see their significance. But van Leeuwenhoek could not. Everything that he saw, he was the first human ever to see. Before then, in a world rife with pseudo-scientific speculation, no one even imagined that the microscopic world existed.
The first modern economy
Antony van Leeuwenhoek began making and using his lenses after establishing himself as a cloth merchant and haberdasher in Delft, in the late 1600's, the Golden Age of the Netherlands. The large ships and brave, hardy sailors of the Dutch Republic ruled the world of commerce. The country was called "the most learned state on earth" and produced some of our best paintings, ever.
With their trustworthy financial instruments and international information flow, their cosmopolitan tolerance and long tradition of shared, distributed power, the Dutch used their ingenuity to develop the world's highest standard of living and what some historians call the first modern economy.
That economy created a growing, prosperous Delft where Antony van Leeuwenhoek had the liberty to pursue the life of a disinterested, though enthusiastic, and rigorous observer of the little world beyond our sight and, until him, beyond our imagining.
Chatty letters
Van Leeuwenhoek did not begin to report his observations until he was forty years old. However, he lived, and observed, until he was past ninety. All of his reports, beginning in 1673, were chatty letters to the editors of the journal of England's upstart Royal Society. In 1680, in recognition of his achievements, the Royal Society elected him a Fellow. By his death in 1723, with over a hundred letters published by the journal, he was their most-frequent author, known and celebrated throughout Europe among scientists and those interested in science.
Van Leeuwenhoek did not know that any of that would happen when, already middle-aged, he began shaping his tiny lenses and mounting them between palm-sized plates and then sticking things on the little pin: plant parts, pond water, and slices of animals' internal organs. He found a cabinet of curiosities and wonders in each specimen.
"What does it matter?"
He held the microscope as close to his eye as he could, resting on his cheek. He angled into the light, and he concentrated. If he told others, perhaps they did not have the patience and curiosity to hold the microscope steady or at the correct angle. Perhaps their eyesight wasn't that good. In any case, they did not always see what van Leeuwenhoek saw, tiny things, millions and millions of them, that had no name. He wrote:
Most go to make money out of science, or to get a reputation in the learned world. But in lens-grinding and discovering things hidden from our sight, these count for nought. ... Most men are not curious to know: nay, some even make no bones about saying, What does it matter whether we know this or not?
In the beginning then, Antony van Leeuwenhoek had a problem. He was Adam in a microscopic Garden. What do you do when you see things that no one has ever seen before?
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Daily Life
in Holland
Social life
Adriaen van Ostade
The Violinist
Oil on canvas, 1672
Galleria Franchetti, Ca' d'Oro, Venice
Van Ostade (1610-1685), from Haarlem in the northern part of Holland, close to the North Sea, painted scenes of daily life. The people are relaxed, unposed, unaware that you're watching, absorbed in the moment. He painted at a time when the days and nights were quieter and all music was played live. The violinist made these Dutch peasants share his smile and fill their tankards and pipes. They all wore a hat or cap. Note the rough hewn boards and the small window panes.
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House
Jan Steen
The Dissolute Household
Oil on canvas, 1668
Wellington Museum, London
Jan Steen (1626-1679) en | nl was born in Leiden to a prosperous, tavern-owning Catholic family. He lived in the Hague, Delft, Warmond, and Haarlem and had two wives and nine children. He earned a good living from his paintings, full of life, humor, and color.
In Dutch, een huishouden van Jan Steen means a messy scene. Playing cards and oyster shells are strewn on the floor. A dog wags its tail over a neglected roast. The pet monkey plays with the clock while the boy snags a couple of coins from his mother's purse. Note the long-stem, small-bowl pipe (tobacco was exotic and expensive), the storage basket above the bed, and the valence over the fireplace.
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Courtyard
Pieter de Hooch
The Courtyard of a House in Delft
oil on canvas, 1658
Pieter de Hooch (1629–1684) en | nl
lived in Delft for a short time, and painted The Courtyard of a House in Delft in 1658. It gives a sense of the quiet peacefulness of everyday life in Delft during van Leeuwenhoek's lifetime.
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